Cisco Says Data Traffic From Video Will Eclipse File Sharing

Up and to the right–that’s the shape, once again, of the latest bar chart of global data traffic growth distributed by Cisco Systems. Not surprising, perhaps, for a company that sells hardware to manage such data communications. Yet there are sub-themes worth noting in the annual forecast Cisco issued Wednesday.

One is that there is finally something bigger than file sharing for network operators to worry about. That practice, which grew up around Napster and other services, is based on a peer-to-peer approach that usually involves people sending data directly between their PCs, not downloading files from a central server. P2P file sharing, as it is often called, became a dominant bandwidth hog as consumers started using such services to download illicit copies of movies, software programs and other data files.

Now, Cisco says, traffic from other forms of video distribution–including sites like YouTube and video-on-demand services–will surpass global peer-to-peer traffic by the end of 2010. That will mark the first time in 10 years that P2P did not rank No. 1 among consumers of Internet bandwidth, the company says.

(It’s not that file sharing won’t grow; it’s just that video services will grow faster, Cisco says. The company predicts a 22% compound annual growth rate for data traffic from file sharing between 2009 and 2014, compared with 33.1% for consumer video services.)